Memoir: A History

At this point, we probably know more about what a memoir is not – it’s not a multicultural tear-jerker about a dying son (“The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams,” by Nasdijj), an Oprah-approved tale of rehab and regret (“A Million Little Pieces,” by James Frey), or an apple-chucking holocaust romance (“Angel at the Fence,” by Herman Rosenblat) – than what a memoir is. So it seems like the perfect time for Ben Yagoda’s new book, the interesting but uneven Memoir: A History.

In a short “Author’s Note,” Yagoda defines memoir as “a book understood by its author, its publisher, and its readers to be a factual account of the author’s life.” Over the next 11 chapters, he surveys not only memoir’s failures – it has averaged “a scandal a year” since 1960 – but also its many successes.

But first, Yagoda details our own memoir-crazed moment. Between 2004 and 2008, the genre’s sales have jumped 400 percent; we now find father-son sets writing dueling memoirs and releasing them within a week of each other. Anecdotes like this offer a sort of rubbernecking appeal – if this isn’t bubble behavior, I don’t know what is – but Yagoda wants to prove that even they have a history: “Every single one of the books, and every piece of the debate about them, had a historical precedent.”